Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein interview each other on Close Listening

Whitney Museum curator of performance Jay Sanders and poet Charles Bernstein discuss their work in, on, and around sound, performance, installation, dance, poetry, theater, poetics, curating, editing, and essay writing. They also reflect on their previous collaboration curating the 2001 exhibition Poetry Plastique at the Marianne Boesky Gallery. This event was organized as part of the exhibition S/N, curated by the 2014–15 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Independent Study Program. The event took place at The Kitchen in New York.

Before the two Close Listening shows, Sanders and Bernstein each read essays. Bernstein read his preface to Pitch of Poetry and discussed his work with audio-tape poems. Sanders followed his essay by playing a track of Colin Nancarrow, as a preview of a show he co-curated, "Anywhere in Time: A Conlon Nancarrow Festival." In the interview, Sanders also discussed his show "Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama."

1. Sanders reads "Mood Elevators and Changing Shapes" (on Guy de Cointet), originally published in Artforum, July 2007. (12:13): MP3

“A major poet for our time — & then some – Charles Bernstein has emerged as a principal voice –maybe the best we have – for an international avant-garde now in its second century of visions & revisions." – Jerome Rothenberg on The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein.

"A superb poet and great inventor of poetry, Charles Bernstein dazzlingly invents the essay for poetry: professing in a gorilla suit and white tuxedo.”—George Lakoff

Robert Creeley: "Bernstein’s is the most provocatively intelligent reaction to the general drift of mainstream poetry, and he is an indefatigable writer of essays and poems wherein the determinations of genre are largely superseded. In short, he has not only given brilliant instance of the confusions of contemporary social and political premises but has done so in remarkable constructs of their characteristic modes of statement, which are not simply parodic but rather reclamations, recyclings, of otherwise degraded material." ––"Help Is on the Way" in The American Book Review (Vol.14, No. 6, 1993), p. 18.